Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005

We have here a body of work at home in its own elusiveness. Language sculpture? That’s one possible, though unlikely, name for what we find here, about which it can be said: it carves into time, as if, in the actual time of writing, poetic process had incised directly into “time matter,” cutting through to undisclosed layers of undertime. Or, from another angle of experience: once inside this elusive work, this unfolding language substance—feeling its attractions (some strange, all at least partly not-yet-known)—one senses a multidirectional crossflow: so much is happening from moment to moment, so much is coming through, one hardly knows where to stand. Quite clearly the poet has chosen her words at a level resistant to immediate thought, no doubt in part for their musics, their senses, and their sensualitites. (“Introduction,” by George Quasha with Charles Stein)

There is no central form, the introduction tell us, to Vancouver poet Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 (Barrytown NY: Station Hill, 2010). There aren’t that many poets of Lissa Wolsak’s generation the author of a published “Collected.” Some older Canadian poets have their versions, from the almost-selected of (up to that point) Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (1989; 2001) and Barry McKinnon’s The Centre: Poems 1970-2000(2004), or Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea (1984; 2004). Much like some other Vancouver poets I could think about, such as Christine Stewart, Susan Clark or Maxine Gadd, Wolsak has published furtively over the years, from The Garcia Family Co-Mercy (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1994) and An Heuristic Prolusion (Vancouver BC: Friends of Runcible Mountain, Documents in Poetics, 2000) to Pen Chants or nth or 12 Spirit-like Impermanences (New York NY: Roof Books, 2000), A Defence of Being, First Ana (Hereford UK: Spanner, 2002) and A Defence of Being, Second Ana (Bray Ireland: Wild Honey Press, 2005), all of which appear in this singular volume of some two hundred and fifty-plus pages. How can a reader catch anything when the author refuses to stand still?

as essential to her task

as teeth or hands

how often, did

by walking the Camino

it is cried to them

to play on the posed hole

of the asp (“Pen Chants”)

There is no central form, instead Wolsak’s extended works embrace an expansiveness, writing directly out a field of fragments, narrative lines and lines of thought; Wolsak writes a precision scattered, deliberate. Calling her work (and the work of Susan Clark, Kathryn MacLeod and Dan Farrell) “both excessive and minimal” in his “Empty and Full Speech: A Lacanian Reading of the Kootenay School” in the recent Open Letter, Fourteenth Series, Number 3, summer 2010 [see my review of such here], Vancouver writer and critic Clint Burnham goes on to say that “this is writing that refuses reference [.]” Reviewing Pen Chants or nth or 12 Spirit-like Impermanences for Rain Taxi, Jen Hofer wrote that:

In Pen Chants, Lissa Wolsak’s practice is not to “eliminate stress,” but rather to place stress accurately—to highlight, illuminate, suggest, declare, question, celebrate, disparage, chant—not through “blindfolding,” but rather through its opposite: an unfolding and enfolding of language that is in Wolsak’s poetic world the sharpest form of expression, through such sharpness—being slick, beautiful, edgy, pointed—entails, appropriately, more difficulty than ease.

Where is the difficulty, and where is the ease, and how is it possible, here, to separate them? As she writes to open her “_______An Heuristic Prolusion_______”:

~ I speak as one silenced. Transhumance, as understood and utilized in late 12^th C., early 13^th C. France, was an agricultural motion or migration, a seasonal moving of livestock and the people who tend them….but transhumance also was a possible personal~social act of symmetry, reciprocity and redistribution. Co-mercy, the art of harmlessness, equivocating sexual/theological, fiat, fiat lux .. to lay the supremely ambiguous, phantomatic faces .. to let, to kneel, along the place of the abyss, to linger as long as possible .. where the same relation may be observed throughout the whole universe, where significance “bleeds into an unconstrainable chain.”

What lies beneath my copy of eternity?

What coils up..in spoken space?

How does one engage with an writing that “refuses reference,” other than being as completely open to the possibilities as possible? But I’ll end with her own words, her last paragraph of an interview at the back of the volume, conducted by poet Pete Smith:

LW: I have an antipathy toward flatland embrittlements within normative sentence making because I have not often enough experienced the truth of their/my constructions. Moreover, the mind is non-local and undermines my smooth to the eye approaches. I choose, rather, to activate consciousness, and to keep a loose hold on the smoky, beguiling and sometime fatuous muse of controlled meaning, but not to exclude the genuinely intended or navigable. I am more a receiver of shape and form than an architect of same. By its very fracture, I write to surprise myself.

Open Text: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century, ed. Roger Farr

Do You Fall in Love at the Drop of Happy

Do you fall in love at the drop of happy
Are you brink
Did you clean
Do you miss yourself or are you dripping
You are taken for
Did you bug
Am I held
Do you internet café
Did you fall in love with a hick while napping
You were dirty for
Do you last
Are we heading
Do you lull in happy at the thrust of dropping
Did it last you
You miss bugs
Do you lullaby the habit of propping
Are your friends
Did you pulp
Did you mean this drop to be unhappy
Yeah you meant it (Jon Paul Fiorentino)

One of the first publications in the new CUE Books series (Capilano University Editions, out of The Capilano Review) is the anthology Open Text: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century, edited by Roger Farr. Meant to be the first third in a larger project, the first two feature poetry, and the third, to feature poetic statements by writers featured in the first two volumes, all of whom have appeared as part of the ongoing Open Text Reading Series hosted by the Creative Writing Program at Capilano University (nee Capilano College) in Vancouver. As editor Farr writes in his introduction:

Editing an anthology of contemporary avant-garde poetry is an inherently risky undertaking as the criteria one invokes in collecting the work are often destabilized by the works themselves. This is especially true when such writing is yoked together under the sign of an apparently shared national identity. I have always thought there should be a fallacy named after the practice of identifying a body of writing with the state-formation that governs its authors. Echoing Charles Bernstein’s observations about “poetic voice,” I would argue that when it comes to poetry and poetics, any alleged quality of “Canadian-ness” is merely a possibility, or an affect—not an essence. So while Open Text is indeed a collection of poetry by Canadian citizens, it is not a collection of “Canadian Poetry,” and makes no attempt to stake a claim for a “New Canon” or even a “New Poetics” on that territory.

A list of the contributors to this volume, working an interesting range of geography and style, include Annharte, Oana Avasilichioaei, George Bowering, Rob Budde, Louis Cabri, Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Maxine Gadd, Claire Huot & Robert Majzels, Larissa Lai, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Jamie Reid, Darren Wershler, Lissa Wolsak and Rita Wong. There have been a number of interesting publishing enterprises to start up lately, and this certainly isn’t the first to come out of a journal (Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton, for example, the longest running independent publishing house in the country (according to their own claim) came out of Fiddlehead Poetry Books and The Fiddlehead), with recent forays into publishing for West Coast Line bringing LineBooks (and finally, an available backlist for Michael Barnholden’s Tsunami Editions) and Snare Books out of Montreal’s Matrix magazine. And considering all the years that parts of the west coast avant-garde felt a closed group, now there’s no way to complain of a lack of opportunity. With all these enterprises popping up across the country, could they do anything but enrich?

Rangutang Rage Writer

She makes it all up. She who knows me. She splits and makes up the stories in my absence. She saw me hide all night in a library. Saw the jealous husband chase me. She will look at me as I lug books to bed. I hide behind the text I read. Her eyes reflect me sawed in half. Says a magician took the other part. What is left is for a medicine woman to define. Our mothers are inside us anyway and might help us out even if they left us alone quite often. For me. For drinks. For laughs. Some of the mammas are popular aunties we visit for bannock and tea. They will become Old Ones. Keep us company. Respect our wounds. Sure got remedies. Pretty preachy words. They call each other a warrior but I don’t know because I am only a sole survivor when nobody was around to defend me.

She watches me croon to the dance drum. Her focus on how I beat on Rangutan chest. Beat memories uncomfortable down inside the breasts. I keep forgetting so I compact it all. She is not that proud so she bears my wounds. She reaches for the trauma but manages to moan how the stab didn’t quite do her in. She’s so lucky for that gift. She is a buddy to my body. She was the one that wore the black eye. She coughed for me at for work when I almost passed out from broken rib. She will convince me that I am angry for nothing. She accepted the abuse for me.

I got nothing to talk about. She does keep it all straight. She does not always write it down like a police investigation. I must have to be ready for her break the awful news to me. Yet, many people attribute her anger to me and confuse me to hell. (Annharte)

Ongoing notes: early January 2006

New year, new writings and new readings, although one can consider that in this, as in so many things, it is simply ongoing. Will any of you be around in February when I read at the Atwater Library as part of the Atwater Poetry Project in Montreal on February 16? Massachusetts poet and academic Lea Graham was here with her husband in Ottawa for a few days around New Year's Eve, visiting friends of theirs that now live in Maxville, of all places. If you ever get to meet them, make sure you do, cuz they're plenty of fun (she's writing an essay on Suknaski for the Guernica Editions collection on his work that I'm editing). And remember, above/ground press 2006 subscriptions are still available for $30…makes a great gift! Late on plenty of publications (you have no idea how far behind I am), some forthcoming ones include Sharon Harris (Toronto), Cath Morris (Vancouver), Karen Clavelle (Winnipeg), Barry McKinnon (Prince George BC), Dennis Cooley (Winnipeg), Stan Rogal (Toronto), Lori Emerson (Buffalo) and Stephanie Bolster (Montreal). Send me money so I can make more! And check out my review of the anthologies Writing the Terrain: Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets (University of Calgary Press) and Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry (Talonbooks) in the January/February issue of Word: Canada's Magazine for Readers + Writers. And have you considered taking my upcoming poetry workshop?

New York NY: I am very interested in the belladonna* reading and chapbook series out of New York City that has promoted the work of numerous women writers both American and Canadian over the past few years, produced and organized by Rachel Levitsky, Erica Kaufman and Sina Queyras. As it says inside Rachel Zolf's from Human Resources (chapbook #82; Rachel was nice enough to send me a copy), "belladonna* is a reading series that promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multi-cultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, dangerous with language." Hosting an interesting mix of new and established, some other writers in the series include Nathalie Stephens, Mairéad Byrne, Lisa Robertson, Erin Mouré, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Kathleen Fraser. Most are still available for $4 (US), but a number of titles are already out of print.

Through her two poetry collections Masque (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2004) and Her absence, this wanderer (Ottawa ON: BuschekBooks, 1999), Toronto writer Rachel Zolf has certainly been producing more and more interesting writing the past few years, but it’s the writing in her work-in-progress Human Resources that has really moved her work up to another level. A long series of fragments, Human Resources explores the language that sits between critical prose and office-speak (an almost gibberishly double-talk). Working through a poetic that includes critical writing and thinking, the pieces in Human Resources take a page from Montreal poet Erin Mouré (a direction also being taken by expat Canadian Sina Queyras), that the essay doesn't have to be separate from the poem.

The mystical white crow, the sword & the flower that
shattered stone standing in a Chelsea gallery watching
an artist get fucked by a collector for $20,000 U.S., it's
always the first cliché 44 would mom off our tongue
they love best: your dreams are possible, you can create
the life you want, there's no better time to make an
investment in your future. How limited the sphere you
negotiate liu Ouagadougou pogrom, "flourish" boasting
too many vowels, "thrive" too abstract. Internal censor
cheapening the impact of words, no nick or dent in the
narrow way the victorious city ritualist G-3 monoculture.
Like the unemployed former Democrats from Flint
swerving behind Bush and false, disfigured certainty, you
hand over the car keys to Jesus and the boss pockets 200
bucks an hour

Zolf has been publishing bits of the work-in-progress in various places (I even published a fragment as an above/ground press broadside), so keep your eyes open for other pieces in other places. Information on the belladonna* series can be found on their website, through email (belladonnaseries@yahoo.com), or by writing the editors c/o 458 Lincoln Place, #4B Brooklyn NY 11238

Vancouver BC: In a package I received from the publisher a while ago is Vancouver poet Lissa Wolsak's A Defence of Being (Ireland: Wild Honey Press, 2005). A 48-page chapbook, Wolsak's A Defence of Being is a sequence of combined fragments that exist as a treatise for existence.

When eyes slither up an arapahoeish moon,
mosquito-net yurt spread with summer quilts,
that is…on simple grounds of luminosity
we cross a ravine by way of a fallen pine-trunk,
water, wind, solar energy and peacefully split atoms
in our employ,
pleasures of emptiness and
absence of telo-numb theatrical gestures,
but if, then, one is the gloss of the other,
observer quandaries
we haven’t the leisure to defeat,
shall it next press that loving to eve,
for here…evidence…an inchoate ear
is my hand smoldering and agape sits lightly upon us,
or rather…less
and less chthonic thrall
release us
fee-simple (p 36)

For a long time, I've wanted to see more of Wolsak's work in a larger format, and available to a wider audience (in Canada at least), after other publications floating around, including The Garcia Family Co-Mercy (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1994), An Heuristic Proclusion (Vancouver BC: Friends of Runcible Mountain, 2000) and Pen Chants, or nth or 12 spirit-like impermanences (New York NY: Roof Books, 2000). Why do so many of these Vancouver poets only seem to get trade books either in limited release locally, and/or larger release in some other country?

~ Writing is my way of listening and ventriloquising
until I reach the place of speaking. Or, in order to
perceive, I create distance, and re-situate my own
epistemological ideas of causation, separation, and
otherness. To find axis, or, an orbital angular
moment, in rejection of its own centrality, always
already disturbing its own refinement. To equipoise
opposing forces, in their moving equilibriums, their
tableaux. (An Heuristic Proclusion)

Vancouver BC: I found myself recently going through my copy of Sharon Thesen's Weeping Willow (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2005) again. Written as a slow sequence for George Bowering's late wife Angela (1940-1999), it moves as an elegy, through the period Thesen spent with Angela before she died. I've always been a fan of Thesen's poetry, and have always wished there would be just a little bit more of it (someday I will have to learn patience), Thesen is the editor of The New Long Poem Anthology, Second Edition (with a lovely cover image by Greg Curnoe; Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2001) and co-editor (with Ralph Maud) of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), and author of a number of poetry collections, including Artemis Hates Romance (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1980), Confabulations: Poems for Malcolm Lowry (Lantzville, B.C. : Oolichan Books,
1984), Aurora (Coach House Press, 1995), A Pair of Scissors (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2000) and a second volume of selected poems, News & Smoke: Selected Poems (Talonbooks, 1999).

Down Larch St. to suppertime.

Angela'd had another dream
in which a school of fish…

& how she should have run off
with the visiting professor…

--Dear reader,
shouldn't we all have run off with someone.

At any rate
we'd talked for hours at the kitchen table,
Angela dispensed Sweet 'n Low
into her coffee as the windows darkened
and it was time to go so

I put on my coat and drove
down the hill in the Honda

many autumns back then

What I have always admired about Thesen's writing are the slow, considered steps she takes, and her poem on Roy Kiyooka after his death was absolutely heartbreaking in its simplicity, saying everything it needed to say (I was disappointed, actually, and surprised that it wasn't included in her Talonbooks selected; and if I could find my copy of Aurora I'd include it here…). Dedicated to George Bowering and his daughter Thea, Thesen's Weeping Willow writes of her relationship with Angela, and Angela's garden, just outside the bedroom window. Fortunately or unfortunately, grief and wanting to work your way through it can be quite an impetus for writing (see also: Frank Davey's honest and heartwrenching journal about his wife, How Linda Died, published by ECW Press, which is an almost essential read). In fragments written almost as small journal entries, Weeping Willow seems reminiscent, somewhat, of the book that George Bowering wrote for his late friend, the London, Ontario painter Greg Curnoe in The Moustache, Memories of Greg Curnoe (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1993).

I remember the last few times I saw Greg Curnoe he had his
current favourite jacket on. It looked like an often-washed,
blue, somewhat-faded jacket with a small crest on it. The crest
had the name of some town in France. A few days after he died
we were at his house, and at the kitchen door, which is the only
door you use to get into that house, I saw the jacket hanging
on a hook. This is an entrance hall with the laundry machines
in it, I think, and a lot of large shoes and boots. On the wall are
the coat hooks, up really high, just under the ceiling. The
Curnoes are all tall. On the way out that night I saw the jacket
hanging where Greg had put it a few days before. I reached up
and touched it and looked at the crest, but I cant remember
what the name of the town is. (The Moustache, Memories of Greg Curnoe)